Sorting string values according to a custom alphabet in Python

Question

I am looking for an efficient way to sort a list of strings according a custom alphabet.

For example, I have a string alphabet which is \"bafmxpzv\" and

Answer 1

Instead of using index() which requires finding the index of a char, a better alternative consists in building a hash map to be used in the sorting, in order to retrieve the index directly.
Example:

>>> alphabet = "bafmxpzv"
>>> a = ['af', 'ax', 'am', 'ab', 'zvpmf']
>>> order = dict(zip(alphabet, range(len(alphabet))))
>>> sorted(a, key=lambda word: [order[c] for c in word])
['ab', 'af', 'am', 'ax', 'zvpmf']